This is the second of a four-part series on planning, building, presenting and evaluating a
staff development program for technology.

There are many questions that need answering as you build your staff development
program for technology. These basic questions are:
-What topics do we cover?
-Who will be involved in the staff development?
-What factors affect our staff development program?
-Why will people take these courses?
-When will we offer these courses?

There are no easy answers to these questions. The strategy that one district or school
selects will not necessarily fit the needs of another district or school. Knowing what other
districts/schools are doing, however, may provide ideas for a program in your
district/school so I will be citing strategies used by a variety of schools and districts
throughout the country. It is important to decide upon staff development policies that will
provide direction as you design your program.

What topics do we cover?
Having completed the needs analysis for your school or district (see last month's issue of
Windows K-12 Technology Newsletter Vol. 1, Issue 2 for information on conducting a
needs assessment), it's time for you to use your newly-acquired information to build a staff
development program for technology. Compiling the results of your needs analysis into a
spreadsheet for quantitative evaluation, you can identify your staff's technological strengths
and weaknesses.

Building a comprehensive program for helping teachers learn how to integrate technology
into their curriculum is not as easy as identifying a day when you will teach your teachers
about word processing. It requires looking at the "big picture." Before you look at your
technology plan, examine your district's/school's curricular plan for the next few years.
What do they identify as student outcomes? What subjects/skills/ideas will be taught and
what will be the learning environment in which they will be learned? Identify the skills and
knowledge your students, teachers and administrators need to achieve these goals.
Perform a "gap analysis" in which you compare where you are with where you want to be,
and you can identify the areas of skill/knowledge development that need to be addressed.
This "bigger picture" attitude reflects a couple of powerful ideas that are altering the
school environment and staff development. The first idea is "results-driven" staff
development. This philosophy decreases the importance of counting the number of
workshops attended and emphasizes how the staff development is altering instructional
behavior and learning environment in a way that benefits students. Although measuring
results might seem an obvious measure of success in staff development, it has not been
used much as an indicator of success. Measures of success for your technology staff
development program will be further discussed in the final part of this series.
The second important change in staff development is the recognition of school as a
system and the complex, interdependent relationships that exist between and among the
sub-systems. Systemic change cannot be achieved through a couple of afterschool
workshops. It requires a multi-year introspection of the existing system and then
identifying how achieving these goals can be facilitated through technology

Who will be involved in the staff development?
The term "staff development" is a limiting term in the context of systemic change. It seems
to limit the population to only people employed by the district or school. Due to the